Georgia Good Samaritan Law: AED, Overdose 911, and Limits

Georgia’s Good Samaritan Law, found at O.C.G.A. 51-1-29, protects you from civil liability when you provide free emergency care at the scene of an accident or emergency, as long as you act in good faith.¹ Georgia does not require you to stop and help — but if you choose to, the statute keeps the person you helped (or their family) from successfully suing you over how it went. The protection covers everyone from a licensed physician to a passerby with no training at all.

What the Statute Protects

The core rule is short. If you in good faith render emergency care at the scene, without charging for it, you are not liable for civil damages resulting from any act or omission in the course of that care. That includes decisions about whether to arrange further medical treatment for the person you helped.¹

Georgia’s statute specifically defines “emergency care” to include rescuing or attempting to rescue someone trapped inside a locked vehicle.¹ Break a window to pull a child out of a hot car and the statute has you covered.

The Conditions You Have to Meet

The immunity is not automatic. Three things have to line up.

Good faith. Your genuine intent has to be helping the person in danger. The statute uses “good faith” as its standard rather than a more detailed reasonable-person test, but that word does real work: acting recklessly, with indifference to the victim’s safety, or with intent to harm will not qualify.
No charge. You cannot bill for what you did or expect payment. Compensation is the line between a volunteer and a professional doing paid work.
At the scene. The care has to be rendered where the emergency happened, not later at a hospital or clinic.¹

Georgia courts have added a fourth requirement that isn’t spelled out in the statute: you must not have had a pre-existing duty to help that person. In Clayton v. Kelly, the Court of Appeals explained that Good Samaritan statutes “are directed at persons who are not under some pre-existing duty to rescue.” A doctor treating a patient at their hospital is doing their job, not acting as a volunteer, so the aid is not “voluntary in the sense of a Good Samaritan.”² An off-duty physician who happens on a car wreck has no such duty and does qualify.

Georgia Does Not Require You to Help

One point catches many people off guard: Georgia imposes no legal duty to rescue a stranger. You can walk past an accident or a person in medical distress and face no criminal or civil penalty for doing so. The Good Samaritan Law is written to encourage intervention, not to mandate it. It removes the downside of choosing to help; the choice is still yours.

When the Protection Does Not Apply

The immunity is broad, but it fails in predictable ways.

You accepted payment. Even if you started as a volunteer, taking compensation afterward can strip the protection away. In Washington v. Clark, the court upheld immunity for a physician specifically because nothing contradicted his testimony that he received no payment.²

It wasn’t really an emergency. The statute applies at the scene of an “accident or emergency,” and Georgia courts read that phrase strictly. More on this below — it’s the issue that trips up the most claims.

You were already on the hook. If your job, an on-call arrangement, or an existing doctor-patient relationship already obligated you to act, the statute does not cover you. In Henry v. Barfield, the court refused to grant summary judgment to a physician because the evidence was unclear about whether he was on call when he treated the patient.²

The statute’s text does not list gross negligence or willful misconduct as an explicit exception, unlike some related Georgia laws that do. In practice, though, the good-faith requirement carries that weight: conduct that is reckless or intended to harm is unlikely to survive a court’s reading of good faith.

What Counts as an “Emergency”

Whether the Good Samaritan Law applies often turns on this one word, so it deserves its own look. The Georgia Supreme Court in Anderson v. Little & Davenport Funeral Home defined an emergency as “the performance of necessary personal services during an unforeseen circumstance that calls for immediate action.”²

The word doing the heavy lifting there is “unforeseen.” Routine or recurring situations do not qualify, even if they look alarming. In Herrin Business Products v. Ergle, the court held that a person’s recurring blood-sugar episodes were not an emergency because the events were “normal and repetitive.” In Gragg v. Neurological Associates, a complication that arose during a routine medical procedure did not transform the situation into the kind of emergency the statute contemplates.²

This is where Good Samaritan defenses most often fail. Someone renders care believing they are protected, and a court later decides the situation was not the sort of unforeseen crisis the statute was written for. If you are helping someone with a known, recurring condition in a controlled setting, the general Good Samaritan Law is unlikely to shield you.

Using an AED

A separate statute, O.C.G.A. 51-1-29.3, addresses the use of automated external defibrillators. It covers anyone who in good faith uses an AED on a person without that person’s objection, the owner or operator of the premises where the AED is installed, any physician who authorized placing the AED there, and anyone who provides AED training.³

The AED statute is more explicit about its limits than the general Good Samaritan Law. Immunity does not apply to willful or wanton misconduct by anyone, and it does not apply to a licensed medical professional who acts with gross negligence while operating within the scope of their profession. AED manufacturers get no immunity at all — product liability and failure-to-warn claims against them remain available.³

Calling 911 During a Drug Overdose

Georgia’s medical amnesty law, O.C.G.A. 16-13-5, deals with a different fear: that calling 911 during an overdose will end in criminal charges for the caller or for the person overdosing. It provides that anyone who in good faith seeks medical assistance for a person experiencing or believed to be experiencing a drug overdose cannot be arrested, charged, or prosecuted for certain drug offenses, as long as the evidence for those charges came solely from the act of seeking that help. The protection covers both the caller and the person overdosing who seeks help for themselves, and it also shields against penalties for violating a protective order or probation or parole conditions when the violation is tied to seeking that assistance.⁴

The amnesty is limited to what the statute defines as a “drug violation”: possession of less than four grams of a solid controlled substance, less than one milliliter of a liquid substance, less than one ounce of marijuana, or possession of drug paraphernalia. Larger quantities, trafficking charges, and any other criminal conduct fall outside it. And the immunity only applies when the drug evidence came solely from seeking help. If police uncover the evidence through an independent investigation, the statute does not block those charges.²

Off-Duty EMS Providers

Emergency medical technicians, paramedics, and licensed ambulance services have their own immunity statute in Georgia’s EMS Act. O.C.G.A. 31-11-8 provides that any person licensed to furnish ambulance service who in good faith renders emergency care to an accident or emergency victim is not liable for civil damages resulting from that care, so long as the provider does not receive payment for those specific emergency services.⁵ An off-duty paramedic who stops at a roadside crash and helps without charge is covered by both this statute and the general Good Samaritan Law.